


The Names of the Dead

by straight_up_gay



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, i love finn and luke so much y'all, welcome to the Skywalker Suffer Dome!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-25 22:39:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9849692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/straight_up_gay/pseuds/straight_up_gay
Summary: On an island by the sea, an old man counts his ghosts.





	

On a planet a thousand light-years from the bright center of the universe, an old man lives beside the sea. The sea is hungry and old, but there is no one for it to eat here. The old man prefers it that way.

To pass time, the old man counts things. On his island, there are three thousand five hundred and fifteen steps, seven hundred and twenty four bricks in the ruined temple, eleven trees, and thirty one gravestones.

(The old man, who is not so old as he appears, carved them all himself. He’d hoped it would pin the names to the ground. It did not.)

At one time, the old man had a name. Now, he has the silence of the island, its comforting numbers.

***

The Old Order had forbidden love and attachment, said that they were the path to suffering and the Dark Side. When ~~Luke Skywalker~~ the old man had started training his apprentices, he'd thought that was so much bantha shit.

Now, on his island in the middle of the sea, he isn't so sure.

***

_Five hundred and twelve, five hundred and thirteen, five hundred and fourteen, five hundred and fifteen, five hundred –_

_Jaero Wrenway. Maddik Blaze. Ieri Nabberin._

– _and sixteen, five hundred and seventeen, five hundred and eighteen._

***

There is a boy. In the oldest stories of the Jedi, there is always a boy.

People think the boy is his mother's son, through and through. They see his dark sulky rages and his brown eyes and his fierce belief in the rightness or wrong of things, and see his mother's fingerprints.

The old man knows that they are wrong.

A million years ago, when he was a teacher and not a gravedigger, he had stumbled on the boy crying and slamming his head into the wall. _It hurts,_ he had said, over and over. _Make it stop!_ He could feel the boy's pain, singing through the Force bright as Durasteel. It wasn't just from the wall; the boy's head had too much in it, too many other people's thoughts. It felt like the sea.

And the teacher realized that the boy was like him.

His sister's use of the Force went outward, convincing and persuading and sometimes even frightening. His own went inward, receiving and sensing and forgiving. It was a blessing, people said, but the kind of blessing that left bruises.

(His sister had once asked him how he forgave their father, that dark violent toy soldier. He hadn't told her that with the way he felt things, not forgiving would be agony).

The teacher had told the boy that he understood, that sometimes his head felt like that too, that they would make it through this thing together. And the boy had looked at him with hope like a sun. 

Even then, the teacher had worried. He'd never felt it that young, the terrible ebb and pull of other people's heads.

Still, he had tried to help the boy control it, teach him the meditation that would soften the blows. It had been (like everything else in the old man’s life) a half-victory, not enough.

***

After the devastation, after the blast that had rocked the Temple to its foundations, the old man had tried to reach for the boy through the Force. His sister had begged him to do it, voice falling on the plains like ash.

He'd tried. Then, he'd turned aside and vomited into the grass.

It was far worse than the way the Force had felt around his father. His father had been tamped down and blunted, finally the machine the Jedi always wanted him to be. But the boy, oh, the boy. He had made himself into something terrible, the Force gaping like a wound around him. He'd torn the threads that went outward, leaving bloody stumps in their place.

Maybe, the old man thinks, it was inevitable. A boy who heard too much and an answering voice that offered silence, for the small price of his soul.

(Maybe, he thinks, on the worst days, if his teacher hadn't promised what he couldn't give…)

***

__

_One thousand, one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and –_

_Kjet Defer. Baya Ackbar. Oono BokTarr. Llara BokTarr. Fash Erato._

_–four, one thousand and five, one thousand and six, one –_

_Dariss Jen. Bann Xenia. Sendier Dan. Ben Orga–_

***

When his first new apprentice arrives, the old man is crushed with relief. In her, the Force is outward and blinding and _bright_ , like the desert sun on Tatooine. In other words, it is nothing like his own.

When his second apprentice comes hard on her heels, he has to swallow down nausea. The Force around him is green and gentle and calm, a hand outstretched. He is another tragedy waiting to happen, another boy who feels too much to ever be at peace in the galaxy.

But the feeling dissipates on talking to him. His new apprentice is fire-touched, more than the old man ever was at his age, but he can reach a hand down into the pain and _twist_. His new apprentice has felt unbearable things, first and second-hand, and he's green in spite of that. By choice.

(Because there are two ways to walk through the fire, and his new apprentice chose the other one.)

So ~~the old man~~ ~~the teacher~~ Luke Skywalker takes his new apprentices to the graves on a moonlit night and tells them about the dead, their hopes and longings, their names.

**Author's Note:**

> Luke and Finn obviously have Force Hyperempathy, and I'm kind of into the idea that Ben Organa did too.
> 
> (I love TFA's emphasis on agency and choice, and my favourite Star Wars Concept is that Finn and Kylo Ren have the exact same Force abilities and they just made _wildly_ different life decisions with them.)


End file.
